Bracket Blunder Costs UConn Fan $100,000; He Didn't Pick a Winner
A bracket blunder ended up costing Corey Johnson of Meriden, Conn. a cool $100,000 Monday when his favorite team won the NCAA championship. 28-year-old Johnson, a lifelong UConn Huskies fan, had a stellar bracket that concluded with UConn and the University of Kentucky Wildcats, but somehow forgot to fill in the winner.
The bracket blunder occurred when Johnson was filling out his bracket for the Yahoo! Sports Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge. The top 20 contestants would win $100,000, but Johnson thinks that a computer error may have been at fault for his bracket, which had no winner.
"I clicked UConn to win, put in the final score, and clicked save," he told NESN. "I guess it didn't save."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Johnson had been checking the leader boards Sunday and saw he was doing really well — the Huskies fan had three out of four Final Four teams, seven of eight Elite Eight teams, and 11 of the Sweet 16 teams picked correctly. However, while everyone remaining had winners picked, his bracket was winnerless.
"As I'm going through the leader boards and everything, I'm noticing that everybody else has a championship winner except for me," he told NBC Tuesday. "Since there was no winner, you know, I'm pretty much out of luck there."
Johnson attempted to get in contact with the bracket organizers, but couldn't find a number and eventually gave up.
The UConn Huskies have been to the Final Four and won before, but Kentucky was more of a long shot. Nevertheless, Johnson filled out the matchup he would've liked to see.
"I knew Kentucky had a solid little basketball team and was just thinking to myself, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Kentucky and Uconn met up in the championship?'" he added.
Now that the tournament is over and UConn has won, his friends have started a change.org petition asking Yahoo! and Quicken Loans to pay their friend. They've even shared it on social media with the hashtag #PayCoreyJohnson, but it hasn't caught on that much — as of this time the petition only has 445 signers.
